It seems to me that in a meeting at USAToday‘s offices, someone told them that making the site look and feel better was somewhat mutually exclusive from offering social features, so they chose “social and really ugly” over “not social but more visually appealing”.
As a designer and someone who visits many news sites each day (New York Magazine, NY Times, Newsvine, Daylife, etc.) I can honestly say this is the most appalling visual redesign I’ve seen in awhile. There are huge gaps of whitespace randomly strewn through the interface, major news article headlines are in the smallest font possible, images are not integrated thoughtfully within each article’s masthead box, they do not explain what the random small colored blocks mean throughout the interface, the bottom half of each page looks like someone just gave up and never designed it, etc., etc.
Scott Karp had this to say about the redesign:
“What are we to conclude from stark contrast between the (sometimes breathless) praise of USA Today’s “social media” redesign among tech/media bloggers and commentators, and the near universal rejection of the redesign among USA Today readers who commented on it? Could it be that it’s really the social media revolutionaries who “don’t get it” when they assume that what the people want is to rise up against the media autocracy and take control, when in fact what most people want is to get high quality information from a reliable source?”
So are “the people” right or the bloggers on TechMeme? Notice that everyone who is praising the social features on this site is praising *the technology* first and not even mentioning the shotty, haphazard user experience, but isn’t that what Web 2.0 is all about? Fawning over Ajax technical implementations and programming libraries before noting that nothing is actually *designed*? Seems like all the technical or social media prowess on the planet can’t buy you happy users, and USAToday is learning that firsthand.
[Read more…] about Earth To USAToday: Adding Social Features Does Not Fix The Ugly